Radiation if I remember also alters the DNA structure, so you are basically altering the DNA of said organisms, causing mutations not made by evolution of species but by external hand. Is that what NASA really want, to analyse mutations on organisms made by us or to analyse the organisms as they are in reality after millions of years of evolution?
Do you have your tinfoil hat ready for use? That stuff happens on Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation
What if said organisms have the replies to some of our problems, like a cure to our most deadly diseases?
More like they possibly can kill us.
I know this kind of thing happens on earth, we live here, we produce stuff to increase food yields and create new breeds of vegetables to increase their resistance to diseases. But that's here, on Earth were we live, not in a "virgin" place like Mars, that didn't had contact with any exterior life (if aliens don't exist
![Evil >:D](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/xevil.gif.pagespeed.ic.tdrs7Uj5gu.png)
) until we started landing explorers on Mars. But whatever, I can't control anything and alone I can't change anything.
I'm not a scientist, I just think that we should preserve things the way they are for the most time we can. We changed the Earth, we created global warming because of our development, and we are depleting the resources of our planet in a scale that increased to us using 1.7 earths of resources by the end of the year compared with 1970:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_DayShould we do the same to another planet just for the sake of our own survival or should we change our approach to everything and change ourselves. I'm not perfect, I'm for sure also someone who have a fault on that, by my own usage of resources each and everyday and never really look at it, so probably I'm a hypocrite at the same level.